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English in Intercultural Settings Lecture Notes
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- Stellenbosch University (SUN)
Covers all the lectures for the English in Intercultural Settings section of AELS318.
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Applied English Language Studies 318English in Intercultural
Settings
Lecture 1: Introduction
What is culture?
• The way of life of a group of people
• The patterns of social organisation and the ‘normal ways’ in which we are expected to behave in
society
• What one has to know/profess to believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to members in
every role that they accept for anyone of themselves
Complexity
• Intercultural communication is inherently problematic
• Communication is complex
• Culture is complex
Communication is complex
• All communication is potentially problematic
o Where there are differences in cultural background, the difficulties can be greater
• Spoken discourse is seen as a joint production
o Everything that occurs results from the interaction of all participants
• Meanings exchanged by speaking are not given in words alone → constructed partly out of what
listeners interpret them to mean
• Interactants must continually make judgements and inferences
o Interpret what has been said
o Generate expectations about what it to come
Culture is complex
• Language, identity, and culture are linked
• Identity relates to how we think about ourselves as people, how we think about other people around
us, and what we think others think of us
Identity and language
• Identity – the linguistic construction of membership in one or more social groups or categories
• Identity may be linguistically constructed
o Through the use of particular languages and linguistic forms associated with specific national,
ethnic, or other identities (eg. Standard English)
o Through the use of communicative practices that are indexed to their group through members’
normative use (eg. greeting formulae, maintenance of mutual gaze, regulation of participation, etc.
,Applied English Language Studies 318
• Language and communication are critical aspects of the production of a wide variety of identities
expressed at many levels of social organisation
Language and culture
• Language is an essential instrument and component of culture
o Embedded in culture
o A cultural activity
o An instrument for organising other cultural domains
• Anthropologists have emphasised the cultural ground of language and thought for many years
o Eg. Polynesian spatial language → reflects community spatial arrangements
o Eg. Australian Aboriginal English → various features involve elements that conventionally evoke
conceptual bases embedded in cultural beliefs and experiences
Paradigms of culture
Essentialist paradigm Non-essentialist paradigm
Rooted in human nature Rooted in human conditions
Static Dynamic
Homogenous Heterogenous
Holistic Internally riven
Deterministic Changeable
Bounded Blurred boundaries
Lecture 2: Essentialist Approaches
Essentialist approaches to ICC
• Scholars in the field of Intercultural Communication (ICC) try to account for the role that culture plays
in communication and the interpretation of meaning
o Often revert to essentialist notions of culture
▪ Cultural value systems
▪ Cultural communication styles
▪ Politeness and face
• These approaches set up comparisons between cultures (typically Eastern and Western cultures) and
focus on ‘clashes between cultures’ → miscommunication
o Can overlook the fact that people from different culture who may not even speak the same
language can often find ways to overcome miscommunication (eg. gestures)
▪ Essentialism does not account for this
What is essentialism?
• Essentialists view people as culturally and communicatively ‘programmed’
, Applied English Language Studies 318
o People are predisposed to act in a particular way → not much in our environment and context
can change that
• Essentialist notions of culture are commonplace
o Eg. Oxford Dictionary definition of culture → “the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a
particular people or society”
o Eg. Western consumer culture, German culture, Afro-Caribbean culture, Jewish culture, etc.
▪ Each of these cultures can be differentiated from other cultures
• Criticism of essentialism → reduces the complexity of a social phenomenon to a single dimension
o Does not engage with the concept in a very complex way
Hofstede (1997) on culture
• Interested in understanding differences in cultural values from an essentialist perspective
• Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes,
meanings, hierarchies, religions, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and
material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people over the course of generations
• Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or
category of people from another
Factors that contribute to a culture
• Geographical location
• Religion
• Gender
• Age
→ Table on slide 7
Cultural value systems
• Communicative behaviour is believed to be strongly influenced by cultural value systems → values
form the heart/core of culture
What are values?
• Enduring attitudes about the preferability of one belief over another
• The social guideposts that show us the cultural norms of our society, and specify in large measures
the ways in which we should behave
• Values are largely formed and held at an unconscious level → common misconception that one’s own
values are universal
Using frameworks to describe cultural values
• Constraint → cultural values are an abstract concept
o Ideally one would study and describe each culture separately
• Frameworks are also a resource
o Aid in the interpretation of actions and communicative intentions
o Help people identify that culture values exist that are different from their own
o Provide a macro-level frame of reference for a discussion of the influences of values at the micro-
level of communicative interactions
• Includes:
o Hofstede’s four dimensions of cultural variability
o Trompenaar’s seven dimensions
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